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Month: January 2013

The pressure built in the cabin, my cabin, oh captain, my captain, he thought, but not prayed. He refused to pray.

The engine roared and his body screamed. Gravity pressed him into his seat, his ribs fractured, his lungs popped, his skin split.

There was so much pain. He squeezed his eyes shut, tears flowing like juice from a lemon wedge. His eyes werebeing juiced and there was pulp: tiny shards of skull swimming through it, ruining the taste.

The atmosphere tore off the shingles and the roof flew away. One and fifty-one inks morphed into a murky bog, providing what little protection they could offer the passengers from the Outside.

Droplets of the mess dripped and melded into the distance. His ink was a disgusting brown-purple fusion. If he still had a stomach, he’d vomit.

The man next to him had camouflage ink.

The woman in 34C had a faded periwinkle that struggled to cover the inky mess of bones and cotton candy next to her.

He’d given up his seat to allow her to protect her daughter.

He couldn’t find our Father.

The stewardess was a deep bronze; her lover’s ink shone bright silver in the bathroom’s golden mirror.

The clouds grabbed those they could kill. The sixteen in first-class were escorted through the bog into the Outside sky. They too melded into the distance.

He felt no pain. There was too much input. Error.

The Man in 30C stood; his insides had created a splatter painting worthy of Pollock on the tray – the ice cubes from his drink added texture. He lifted his arms to his side and dove up. He didn’t worry about holding his breath as he swam through the muddled inks; instead he fixated on opening what was left of his eyes, letting the ink flow through his body. In the eyes, out the scattered holes and fault lines, the ink spurted, flowed, burst.

Fire. Ink’s flammable and when the Man in 30C exploded, the bog went up in flames. The coagulate meteorites rained down on them like children’s sparklers at the First Battle of Manassas.

What a brave new world this was.

His bones cried out for release. Hush, he told them, we are calm on the Outside. You’re all that’s left of our Inside; it set fire to our home.

We’re innocent they cried. It’s not survival of the innocent, the clouds laughed. Only the worst survive. The good die young.

And suddenly he was back. The plane’s engine died down. He looked around wide-eyed. The periwinkle-woman and her cotton-candy-daughter were alive. The military man next to him was snoring, oblivious to the world.

Somewhere between the half-lidded eyes and buzzing limbs, and the darting eyes and jittery toes, it disappears and I’m left laying in my bed, alone with my thoughts and the accompanying headache.

It strikes hard when it happens, leaving you breathing so heavily you feel breathless. And when it doesn’t? That’s the worst feeling in the world. Everything aches. You’re conscious of every muscle, every joint, every ligament, and how all of them are sore, stiff, tired.

To be worn out is, in the most literal sense, to be used so often that it becomes unusable. However, that doesn’t signify tiredness. You can be worn out beyond repair, but not feel tired, not be exhausted, not be able to sleep.

Sleep evades me like the lover that got away. She brushes your body in a quick hug and dashes off into the distance, singing a song that gets stuck in your head. Too bad you don’t know the words or the tune.

It leaves you searching, what for, you don’t know. You’re pretty sure you’ve always been searching for something.